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31 December 2015

Happy New Year to all especially to those taking part at the World Universities Debating Championships in Greece at the moment. Remember that no matter if you break or not tonight make sure to enjoy the tournament. You won't get to take part in very many World Championships in your life and this will be a special memory as you look back at it.

4 January 2015

Recipients of the Distinction Award at the World Universities Debating Championships. This is awarded by Council to recognise years of service to debating. These become life long, but non-voting, Emeritus members of Worlds Council. In this way it ensures a sort of "institutional memory" at council.

11 July 2013

I recently received an e-mail from Frank McKirgan. Frank was part of the Glasgow Dialectic team that won the World Universities Debating Championships in 1983. He was able to correct a number of mistakes in the records of the tournament and provide a short colour piece about the tournament. I have corrected the information on this blog but I am aware that the results and history are replicated on many other sites around the world.

Therefore if you have the results of the 1983 championships on your website you need to make the following corrections:
- The beaten finalists were actually Auckland (Stuart Bugg
and David Kidd) not Toronto.
- The best speaker was Michael McFarlane (Glasgow Union) not John Geisnell

Thanks to Frank for the corrections and it was great to communicate with someone from the early days of the championships.

Princeton 1983
Princeton took up the torch when the
University of Auckland failed to organize a tournament. There had been a
great deal of talk of subsidized airfare to New Zealand, but this all
suddenly went quiet. Frank McKirgan and John Nicolson of Glasgow
Dialectic met and defeated the defending champions Auckland (Stuart Bugg
and David Kidd). It had been reported in the past that the beaten
finalist was a University of Toronto team of Jeff Nankivell and Francis
Daniels. However Frank McKirgan contacted me directly to correct this.
The best speaker at the tournament was Michael McFarlane from the
Glasgow University Union (a different society from the winning Dialectic
team). As with the beaten finalists John Geisnell, from an unknown
university, was previously recorded as the best speaker but again Frank
McKirgan has corrected this and confirmed it with John Nicolson. For
better or worse, the World Debates council was formed at this
tournament. The general idea was to get a bit more organized, and
possibly prevent world tournaments from evaporating completely. Prior to
that, issues such as the next tournament location and haggling over who
should get to go had been decided by a general meeting of all teams
present. Given the track record on bidding and hosting the tournament, a
World Council probably couldn’t hurt.

Here is a little colour piece written by Frank McKirgan

The competition took place in March and the rest day coincided with
St Patrick's Day. A number of the competitors went up to New York City the night
before and spent a very long night and day experiencing the 'St Patrick's Day
spirit' in the city. The final was between defending champions from Auckland
(Stuart Bugg and David Kidd) and Glasgow University Dialectic Society (John
Nicolson and Frank McKirgan). The final was held in Nassau Hall (the first home
of the US Congress) and the motion was 'This House would apologise for the
American Revolution' with Glasgow proposing.

All the previous rounds had been judged by a three judge panel. For
the final, there were three judges and the organisers decided to award 2 votes
to the result of the audience vote. After the debate the organisers announced
that the judges voted 2-1 in favour of Glasgow and the 500-odd audience vote was
exactly tied. The 2 audience votes were split evenly giving Glasgow the trophy
3-2. Just one person in the audience could have changed the result.

Michael McFarlane from Glasgow University Union won the prize for
best speaker.

After the event the both the Glasgow teams plus the team from
Edinburgh went on a tour which visited Harvard, Yale, McGill, Toronto, Ottowa
and Hamilton.

We have up to three slots remaining on the Adjudication Core. It would be good if you can send any feedback about any of the applicants to Stephen Whittington (whittington.stephen@gmail.com) by Friday 4 May. Please feel free to indicate whether you are supportive of having an adjudication core of 5 people, or would prefer 4.

26 April 2012

Phase 2 of the institutional registration process has begun. As contact person
named in the registration, you should have received an email with detailed
information regarding payment and adjudicator registration. Please note that
you are required to open your FastRego account by May 2nd.

If you
think you should have received that email but did not, please check your spam
folder. If we have not reached your institution, please email our Participant
Affairs Officers Dessislava and John.

As for independent adjudicators,
the questionnaire you will be asked to fill in is being finalized. We should be
able to start the application period within the next couple of days. It will
last until June 25th.

22 April 2012

NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad successfully organised the 2nd edition of the NALSAR Inter-Varsity Debate from 5th to 8th April, 2011. The team from National Law School, Bangalore comprising Badrinarayanan Seetharaman and Sounak Sarkar emerged the champions, while Lucas Li and Ashish Kumar of University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, were declared runners-up. Vipul Nanda from National Law School, Bangalore, was adjudged the Best Speaker of the tournament, and Aditya Shetty from Sardar Patel Institute of Technology, Bombay, won the Best Adjudicator prize. The debate saw attendance of 64 teams and participants from different parts of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Munich and the United Kingdom, making it one of the most widely attended debates in India. The final round witnessed a nail-biting finish as National Law School, Bangalore, Cambridge University, IIT Bombay and a cross team between IIT Bombay and the Technical University of Munich debated the motion, “This House believes that grave economic inequality justifies violent revolution.”

The first edition of the debate was a pioneering effort in introducing to Indian shores the format of British Parliamentary debating, the default format for parliamentary debating around the world and the style followed at the debating World Cup – the World Universities Debating Championships. The debate continues to be one of only two tournaments in India that follow this format.

The debate boasted a stellar adjudication core comprising internationally renowned debaters Sharmila Paramanand (Chief Adjudicator at the Berlin World Universities Debating Championship, 2013) and Harish Natarajan (champion of the British inter-varsity debating circuit and semi-finalist at the World Universities Debating Championship, 2010 and top 10 speaker at the World Universities Debating Championship, 2009), along with two national debating stalwarts who have made their mark in debating internationally – Aashay Sahay(Breaking debater at the Asian British Parliamentary Debating Championship and Best Adjudicator at several national tournaments) and Pranay Bhatia (Semi-Finalist and 2nd Best Speaker at Asian British Parliamentary Championship).

Vishwajith Sadananda, Convener of NALSAR’s Literary and Debating Committee, said that he was heartened by the drastic improvement in the quality of debating and the uniformly positive reviews that the debate received this year. However, he noted that the next edition of the debate could happen in October of 2012 itself, so as to serve as a preparatory ground for the Asian British Parliamentary Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship, that follow immediately after.

16 April 2012

Having noticed that my twitter account was getting a bit swamped I spent some time over the weekend putting together a "List" of debate related Twitter accounts. It is mainly debating societies and competitions but I'm hoping that I can use lists to better isolate the news segment I am interested in following (e.g. debating news from friends news from Irish news etc).

How to debate

World Debating News

The website founder and editor is Colm Flynn. Colm is an emeritus member of the World Debating Council, a former Deputy Chief Adjudicator of Worlds and Chair of Worlds Council. He lives in Ardfinnan Co. Tipperary, Ireland. Colm is supported by a team of contributors from around the world. To submit an article e-mailcolm_flynn@hotmail.com